The City boys scrub up well with Mopp

City boys make tidy profit with their online cleaning venture

Two London friends who set up a cleaning business after struggling to find someone to clear up after a house party today made a tidy profit when they sold the company for “several million pounds”.

Former City high fliers Pete Dowds, 28, and Tom Brooks, 29, founded Hackney based Mopp last year as a £10-an-hour online cleaning service after seeing a gap in the market.

Today’s deal sees the company snapped up by US firm Handy, a similar business founded by Harvard graduates in 2012 offering US customers handymen and cleaners.

The pair, both from north London but who met studying at Sheffield University, had the idea when they hosted a party in 2013 at their Whitechapel flat. When they decided to call a cleaner in the morning the phone numbers listed on websites kept ringing out.

The company has seen business increase 11-fold in the past 12 months and now takes 10,000 bookings per month through its website and app, making it a big challenger to mainly eastern-European run cleaning firms across the capital. The pair are now hoping to expand the business.

They employ 30 full-time staff and use more than 1,000 security-checked cleaners across the UK. The meteoric success of the business led to the men quitting their jobs — Dowds as a corporate lawyer for a hedge fund and Brooks as a City broker. They will both take shares in Handy.

The US company operates in 27 cities worldwide, has raised $49 million (£30 million) from investors to expand and saw the London firm as a perfect partner. Chief executive Oisin Hanrahan said: “Mopp was exactly what we were looking for.

They’re a highly driven, innovative team with the same vision and values as Handy. London is a core market for us and the British have consistently embraced technology that makes their lives easier, and have an international reputation for being proud of their homes.”